Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

As he pulls her into the first room, there’s the smell of stale booze and something burnt. Then she sees the mattress in the corner. It’s scorched in the middle and stained at the far end. A pile of sheets lies beside it, singed and streaked with ash. The only other furniture in the room is a dresser that has been emptied of its drawers, which sit on the floor filled with food wrappers, empty beer bottles, and cigarette butts.

“Was it like this when you checked out the place?” she asks. Maybe she should have taken the time off work to come up with him after all.

He shakes his head. “Somebody must have found the key. Probably just some kids.” With an anxious look, he starts for the hallway.

“Where are you going?”

“To check the other rooms. If they trashed the house—”

“Hey, we’ll manage.” She grabs his hand to pull him back. “You said it was a fixer-upper, right?” If the whole place is in bad shape, he’ll want to clean it up right away, and then there won’t be time for the two of them.

She gives him a long kiss. When she feels his hesitation, she kisses him again.

“Brid and Pauline will be here soon—” he says.

“Exactly,” she replies. “We don’t have much time.”

He slips a hand under her dress; she reaches for his belt. A shoe comes off, then his glasses. Once his jeans are around his knees, she draws away.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Turn the mattress over.” She removes her bra from beneath her dress and tosses it at him. “I’ll be back in a second with sheets.”

In the camper, she consults her packing list, then finds the bedding in the box assigned to it. When she returns to the bedroom, Fletcher’s lying naked on his stomach across the mattress, the afternoon light filtered by blinds. She spreads a sheet over him like a fisherman casting a net. It billows and parachutes onto him, pushing the air across his skin, making all the little hairs along his arms and legs stand on end before the fabric settles. The blinds move in and out against the window screens.

Lying beside him afterward, she remembers another time, another shabby house in the early summer sunlight. Eight years old, she enters the living room clothed head to toe in white, her dress wrinkled from the ride home, the knee-high stockings starting to itch and her father across the room in his easy chair, watching television. Over the carpet she runs to him, the veil scrunched in her hand, torn off as soon as she escaped Gran’s station wagon. Maggie launches herself onto his lap and turns herself around so they can stare at the set together.

“How’d it go, little girl?” he asks. “Say your lines all right?”

She nods and kicks off her shoes, then starts to recite the words again under her breath. He lets her go on awhile before shushing her, and they both fall into the rapture of the screen.

“One day will you come to church with us?” she asks after a time.

“You know the answer to that.” He sounds pained and says no more. Her father has told her he went to Mass every week when he was a boy so now he doesn’t have to go. That’s how it works, he says. Gran was disapproving when Maggie repeated his words, but now that Maggie has taken Communion, perhaps she too will be given a choice. She imagines having to decide and can’t make up her mind. If it were only up to her she’d stay home, but her father says it’s good that she keeps Gran company, even if he seems sad each Sunday morning when Maggie kisses him goodbye.

“Get your old man a beer?” he says.

Without a word, she jumps down and runs for the fridge. Today, as she received Communion, she was made to understand that something had changed forever. It seems this ritual will remain, though, Maggie bringing him beer and changing the channel when he asks. Sometimes she would prefer a book, but her father never reads. He says books only tell you about the past; it’s TV that keeps you up to date. Side by side each evening he and Maggie sit before the set, eating their dinners from foil compartments on trays. When they visit Gran next door, she makes wry comments about scurvy and the Children’s Aid, and then Maggie’s father buys apples or grapes that sit on the counter gathering dust until the house grows lousy with fruit flies. There are times when Maggie herself wishes for some kind of change in their routine—a friend to stay over, dinner at a restaurant—but her father appears content, though he has no hobbies and doesn’t travel, hardly leaves the Syracuse city limits. He never complains about clerking at the Public Works Department. It seems he wants nothing beyond the silent hours of Maggie’s company in the living room, and the worst way in which she could betray him would be to ask for more herself. Sitting with him in his easy chair, she puts the veil back on and flips it side to side, watching the television grow clear and shrouded by turns.

It wasn’t until her childhood was over that she realized she’d been desperate to get out. Her father must have sensed it sooner, the way he turned against her once she got to college. Then she spent half her money on long-distance calls from Boston, close to tears, trying to make him understand without saying it outright that he shouldn’t take it personally, she just didn’t want the same things he did. Except now he’s in Laos, and what the hell does she know about what he wants? Maybe if she understood his desires she wouldn’t be so angry with him.

When she lies in bed next to Fletcher, he’s not so different from how her father used to be. She’s pretty sure that nothing would make him happier than for the two of them to remain there for hours. Sometimes she can take pleasure from listening to him as he flatters her with compliments that are, in her eyes, demonstrably untrue. Now, though, as he begins to doze beside her, the prospect of Brid’s arrival makes her restless. She can’t stop picturing the other rooms, imagining floors littered with used needles and broken glass. Brid won’t stand for such things. Even though Fletcher introduced the two of them only a few months ago, Maggie knows enough to realize that. Brid has been Fletcher’s friend for years now. She’s older than he and Maggie are, almost thirty. She has organized protests and founded a health food co-op, and on top of all that, she’s a mother. She’ll want the house to be safe for her daughter. Maggie gets out of bed and starts to gather her clothes, hoping that Brid and Pauline have been delayed, that there might still be an hour in which to tackle the worst of whatever’s waiting.

The next room along the hallway is unfurnished and undisturbed. Fletcher told her the house’s previous occupants left things behind when they moved out last year, but the other bedrooms are mostly barren too. Then, upon entering the bathroom, she smells something putrid. She doesn’t have the courage to investigate, so she goes downstairs and checks out the living room. It has a couch, a glass-top coffee table, and an armchair. Empty bottles lie scattered across the floor, and on the wall someone has spray-painted a peace sign.

The kitchen is at the back of the house, hot and airless, with a Formica table and a few chairs. Two of the walls are clad in dingy paper; the others are exposed fieldstone that might be attractive if there were fewer cobwebs hanging from it and the mortar between the stones weren’t crumbling. A little ridge of broken bits along the floor looks nearly geological. In the mud room off the back, the window that Fletcher smashed reveals an expanse of grassy yard with a wooden outhouse to one side. Farther on, the cherry trees wave in the breeze as if beckoning her, but she wants to get a start on things before Brid shows up. Maybe she can clean the kitchen at least. When she goes to the sink and tries the tap, it shakes violently, then vomits brown water that eventually runs clear.